Air Force tests two turboprops as potential A-10 “replacements”
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
But another problem with American policy is a need to keep American casualties to a minimum, to the point of being the overriding directive.
So from a combat perspective, a good solution is light, low-cost planes that can fly from very rough airstrips close by, armed with a light cannon that can shred buildings, light armor, and other low-intensity cover, and fly slow enough to make in-the-moment decisions from visual inspection by a human pilot. But such a plane is a tempting target for inexpensive, widely available shoulder-fired missiles, or even old-fashioned flak. And then casualties go up. This isn't WWII anymore. America won't tolerate high casualty rates politically for problems that are not existential threats to our nation.
And a cheap low-tech plane solution also has to slot in somewhere between drones (expensive but effective), and the helicopter gunships that have had the mission since Vietnam.
So instead, we're going to keep using hammers to swat flies, because we might need hammers against Russia someday and we're rich anyhow.
It's the basic game theory: you have to be prepared in wars you don't want to happen, exactly because you being prepared for them prevents it.
Preventing conflict by developing ways of measuring outcome of a potential conflict without actually acting it out is a technique that's been used by animals way before humans came along.
Perhaps you could clarify your point a bit?
Seems like you could build a drone that meets your other specifications. You can either spend the saved lbs on more armor and weapons, or make the aircraft lighter for even shorter takeoff.
My cynical view is that too many people wearing stars grew up in the cockpit, and are still fixated on human pilots. If a remote drone manager in Henderson can handoff a CAS asset to your control, why do you need a human pilot in the mix?
In other words it's been adequate in reality but inadequate in fantasy scenarios.
If you are really into weapon history, the Phoenix missile was originally meant for an airforce super interceptor, think an armed version of the SR-71. It was meant to shoot down Valkyrie-class supersonic bombers carrying nuclear weapons. That scenario never developed, but the navy took the missile for blue water battles defending carriers. Arguably, the f-14 was only so big and powerful because it needed to haul a radar capable of servicing the missile. Phoenix was never useful in mixed environments where friendlies might be in range because that wasn't part of the original intention. It was meant for killing big/fast things approaching in open sky, not picking out Migs over Syria.
"They performed well, but their primary role was to intimidate the Iraqi Air Force and avoid heavy engagement to protect the fleet's numbers. Their presence was often enough to drive away opposing Iraqi fighters. The precision and effectiveness of the Tomcat's AWG-9 weapons system and AIM-54A Phoenix long-range air-to-air missiles enabled the F-14 to maintain air superiority"
... and nuclear missiles. Which have rendered symmetrical overt warfare with peer opponents obsolete. From now on it's all either covert, assymetrical or deniable (fighting without insignia) warfare.
Rather than an opponent spend hundreds of billions of dollars on aircraft, it's much cheaper to spend it on Facebook attack ads to get America to destroy itself.
The US has never really faced a peer that was both economically and militarily its equal. The USSR never was. China might end up that way.
Israel has had nuclear weapons since the mid 1960's, yet still fought two existential wars. Nuclear weapons aren't a panacea; if your opponent thinks you won't use them, then they're worse than useless.
[1] And the entire DoD needs to re-think about how and why we're usually deploying Marines on land, for typical land-based missions that are the main remit of the Army.
This would help ameliorate the current situation where the Air Force seems compelled to try to cancel every airplane that's not the F-35.
[1] Apparently this originates in the "Johnson-McConnell agreement of 1966" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson-McConnell_agreement_of...
The don’t need the howitzers, just a couple of M61’s and a couple of the rocket pods.
We must go after the New and Shiny, and it costs billions.
Kind of like a lot in our society.
A simplistic solution would be to design weapons around common, proven components and, if possible, interchangeable ones - designing engines and weapons to have similar mount-points, avionics that can be used on multiple vehicles and be field-upgraded and build everything about as much incremental improvements as possible (yes, I know nothing will make an F-14 a stealth fighter so some big steps are needed, but if the follow-up plane could use similar engines, that'd make logistics much simpler)
I read military writers on Quora and the general sense is that it's going to be the Army and Marines that are going to form the backbone of power projection on land. The Marines are shifting their squad composition from 3 teams of four and a leader to four teams of three. One of these squad member's only job is to operate the proliferating tech tools that's becoming available to individuals.
So it's not even certain what capabilities CAS is going to need to have in the near future. Everyone's talking about loiter time, and certainly, that's really helpful, but what about the squad's soon-to-come drones? If that doesn't make the need for loiter obsolete I don't know what will.
A squad with a reconnaissance drone and portable mortars can do a hell of a lot without having to commit an aircraft. What will they need that aircraft for? Carrying weapons that the squad can't. Cue the fighter-bombers.
I can see why the Pentagon isn't chomping at the bit to spend boatloads of money on something they probably won't even need half of by the time they're done.
If you built a new plane around a GAU-12 you'd get pound for pound more killing. Lighter smaller ammo means more of it, and trust me 25mm will kill anything you might plausibly be killing with 30mm in this century.
Don't worry though, I'm pretty sure the USAF is too arrogant to actually adopt a turboprop airplane, so the A-10 will likely be with us for the foreseeable future...
They can at least try to make it look more modern. Adopt pusher engines and a canard wing.
> The original layout was of a low wing canard configuration, aircraft powered by a pusher turboprop, and built around a 30 mm Gatling gun capable of destroying light armored vehicles
The actual prototype ended up with a turbofan. Still had a canard wing though. It also had a GAU-12 as the canon, just like GP wants.
It's also made out of fancy composites. It sounds like the perfect plane for the Hacker News Air Force.
And fancy shapes and materials resulted in the F-35 clusterfuck.
The GAU-8 can no longer kill top-line Russian armor? Source?
Everyone fawns over it, but the GAU-8 only had moderate penetrating abilities against T-62s, less against the T-64.
In order to "kill" a T-62, the A-10 had to approach it from very specific directions, at very specific angles of attack. The Soviets knew this so they co-located anti-aircraft artillery with their armor units and any A-10 making a gun run on a tank would have been flying through a hail of anti-aircraft fire.
In order to penetrate a thin sliver of armor on the sides of the T-62, an A-10 pilot HAD to fire from from the side of the tank at "1500 feet away, at 3 degrees of dive, at 320 knots". The Soviets knew this, too.
What direction do you think the barrels of the ZSU-23-4 self-propelled radar-guided anti-aircraft vehicles were pointed, when moving in formation with T-62s?
The PGU-14/B depleted-uranium armor piercing round, the most "anti-tank" bullet the GAU-8 fires, can penetrate 55mm of armor at 1,220 meters and 75mm at 300 meters. There are very few parts of the T-72 that have armor thinner than 75mm.
Also, those penetration figures are for steel. Very rapidly after the introduction of the A-10, the Soviet Union started outfitting all of its main battle tanks with composite armor and additional external armor.
So at best if you pepper a tank with a full magazine of PGU-14/B fired from a GAU-8 you're probably hoping to break its track, poke a hole in an external fuel tank, or puncture its main gun-- not destroy it.
Crews inside modern main battle tanks would probably hardly notice being hit by fire from a GAU-8.
Here is the "A-10 Coloring Book", written by cold war A-10 pilots as a training aid covering how to shoot at T-62. T-62s were only vulnerable from the rear, and thin (hard to hit) slivers along the sides.
https://imgur.com/gallery/fd4sK
The T-64 was harder to kill, and the T-72 almost impossible.
Due to anti-aircraft assets being closely-coupled to Soviet tank formations it was predicted that every single A-10 pilot would be dead two weeks into a hypothetical war with the Soviet Union, and this was 40 years ago.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-8_Avenger#Specifications
These sort of numbers are a bit tricky since some anti-tank weapons are more effective against modern armor than others, meaning the armor will have a different RHA equivalency ratings against different kinds of weapons. For instance, per wikipedia, the M1A1HA's turrent is rated for 600mm / 800mm vs APFSDS (sabot), and 1,300mm vs HEAT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolled_homogeneous_armour#Curr...
Some people love it because it's a high capacity, high accuracy bomb truck. One A10 can provide a lot of close air support with just what's hanging from the wing.
IMHO, it's like an All-in-One printer. You can have a machine that sucks at a bunch of things, or does one or two things really, really well. Not both.
Ironically it was widely exported to South America where the Super Tucano is now cleaning-up as a replacement in the absence of anything else.
Every 30 years the USAF rediscovers the need for a cheap close-air- support aircraft.
Interesting pattern that repeats across multiple fields. I wonder how that compares to the average USAF career duration.
Airpower is really quite limited. Boots on the ground will always be required, and that's something the US has grown tired of providing.